Posts Tagged ‘adium’

Files, directories, and devices that are writable by any user (“world-writable”) on a multi-user system can be dangerous locally exploitable security holes. There are very few legitimate reasons for having world-writable files and directories on a system.

Many UNIX and Linux systems actually have cron jobs that check for world-writable files. On Apple’s OS X there is no such safeguard and many vendors do not seem to care about file permissions much at all. Several well-known applications are either installed with world-writable files or create them when used:

Something for the Mac users this time. I have written a little plug-in for Adium recently.
It can be downloaded and installed from the Adium Xtras site.

The plug-in, called Contact Album, stores all the icons that your contacts use over time and comes with a viewer for the icons.

click for larger view

After installation of the plug-in, the album will slowly fill with icons as your contacts change them. You can open the album viewer with the Contact Album entry in Adium’s Window menu and with the View Album entry in the context menu for contacts.
Currently the plug-in comes with English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, and Swedish localizations. Further translations are welcome.